Department of Geosciences

Department of Geosciences

When trying to interpret the fossil record, we must first understand how they ended up where they are -- and that means taking a close look at the sediments that surround them, says Penn State scientist Mark Patzkowsky.

Melting of glacial ice will probably raise the sea level around the globe, but how fast this melting will happen is uncertain. Greenland is especially pivotal in the study of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels because it experiences 50 percent more warming than the global average. In the case of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the more temperatures increase, the faster the ice will melt, according to computer model experiments by Penn State geoscientists.

Molecular clocks -- based on changes in genetic material -- indicate much younger ages for a wide variety of plants found as fossils in southern Argentina than do the solid, geologic dates of those fossils, according to geoscientists who surveyed recent paleobotanical discoveries in Patagonia.

Identification of planets orbiting distant stars is spurring the search for an Earth-like planet. Now a team of researchers has developed a way to distinguish a distant Venus-like planet from an Earth-like one.

Near real-time analysis of the April 1 earthquake in Iquique, Chile, showed that the 8.2 event occurred in a gap on the fault unruptured since 1877 and that the April event was not what the scientists had expected, according to an international team of geologists.

After the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period that triggered the dinosaurs' extinction and ushered in the Paleocene, leaf-mining insects in the western United States completely disappeared. Only a million years later, at Mexican Hat, in southeastern Montana, fossil leaves show diverse leaf-mining traces from new insects that were not present during the Cretaceous, according to paleontologists.

James Kasting, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, will present "4th Rock From The Sun: Exploring The Mysteries Of Mars," at 12:30 p.m. on April 10 at Schlow Centre Region Library as part of the Research Unplugged series.

Today in Australia they call it Kauri, in Asia they call it Dammar, and in South America it does not exist at all unless planted there. However, 52 million years ago the giant coniferous evergreen tree known to botanists as Agathis thrived in the Patagonian region of Argentina, according to an international team of paleobotanists who have found numerous fossilized remains there.

Scientists should take the conservative approach when searching for habitable zones where life-sustaining planets might exist, according to James Kasting, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, including when building Terrestrial Planet Finders.

Much like the Grand Canyon, Nanedi Valles snakes across the Martian surface suggesting that liquid water once crossed the landscape, according to a team of researchers who believe that molecular hydrogen made it warm enough for water to flow.